The most successful uprising of its kind, however, took place at the Sobibór extermination camp. In the summer of 1943, transports of Jews from the General Government to the killing center grew fewer in number. Sensing that they might be murdered along with the last groups of deportees, the veteran Jewish Sonderkommando laboring at the extermination camp formed an underground resistance cell, led by Leon Feldhendler, a former Judenrat member from the nearby village of Zolkiewka. Feldhendler believed that the group’s best chance of survival was to escape the camp. He and his followers had witnessed many individual flight attempts, but experience had taught them that these invariably ended in the capture of the escaping prisoners and fierce retaliation on the rest of the camp population. Feldhendler convinced his colleagues that the solution lay in a mass escape from Sobibór. But how to organize a breakout that could provide all prisoners a chance to escape? In September 1943, a transport of Jews from Minsk brought to the camp first lieutenant Aleksandr (“Sasha”) Pechersky, a trained Soviet officer with combat experience. The resistance cell recruited Pechersky, asking him to mastermind an uprising that might free Sobibór’s six hundred prisoners.
On October 14, 1943, Pechersky’s plan came to fruition. At 4:00 p.m., Thomas (Tuvia) Blatt and a handful of his fellow prisoners cornered their first adversary, SS-Unterscharführer Josef Wolf, murdering him with an axe. Wolf was the first of eleven German and Ukrainian guards killed in the uprising. Other conspirators seized weapons and explosives. The facility’s electricity and phone wires were cut. Under a hale of SS fire, prisoners cut through the camp’s dense net of barbed wire and made a perilous dash through the minefields that encircled the camp.
By evening, half of the camp’s population, three hundred prisoners, had escaped. About one-third of these individuals were eventually recaptured and murdered. Those inmates who had remained behind during the uprising were also killed shortly before the liquidation of the camp some weeks later.11 Many of those still at liberty joined partisan units or received shelter and aid from sympathetic Poles. Nearly seventy prisoners who escaped Sobibór survived the war.12
11. Many of these were prisoners in Camp III, where, isolated from the main camp, they remained unaware of the uprising.
12. Among these individuals were Sasha Pechersky (1909–1990), Thomas (Tuvia) Blatt (1927–), and Leon Feldhendler (1909–1945). Feldhendler survived to see the July 1944 liberation of Lublin, where he and his wife had lived in hiding, but was murdered by members of an antisemitic Polish paramilitary group on April 2, 1945. For a discussion of the Sobibór revolt by eyewitnesses, see Dov Freiberg, To Survive Sobibor (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2007); Thomas Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997).
One of those survivors was Berel Dov Freiberg, just fourteen years of age when he was selected from a transport of Jews from Krasnystaw to labor in a Sonderkommando unit at Sobibór.13 A year later the teenage Freiberg served as a courier during the Sobibór uprising, keeping the individual actors in the revolt abreast of developments occurring in other parts of the camp. With his fellow prisoners, the fifteen-year-old participated in the killing of several German and Ukrainian guards before making his escape. In 1945, the youngster gave a dramatic account of the prisoner rebellion to Bluma Wasser, herself a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and, with her husband, Hersh Wasser, a chronicler for the underground archival organization Oneg Shabbat.
13. For a more detailed discussion of the experiences of Berel Dov Freiberg and his arrival at Sobibór, see chapter 5.
Document 9-2. Oral history of Berel Dov Freiberg, recorded by Bluma Wasser, 1945, in Isaiah Trunk, ed., Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution: Collective and Individual Behavior in Extremis (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 283–87.
At exactly four p.m. Untersturmführer Neumann came to the tailors to have a uniform measured. He was received very warmly, told to sit down, and from behind, his head was split into two pieces with an axe and the halves were swept under the bunks. [. . .] At the exact same time, [Oberscharführer] Greshits, a Ukrainian, arrived at the shoemaker workshop, and in a second, he was turned into a corpse. Any German caught by the Jews was assassinated. If they came into the barrack to force us off to the labor sites, we thought to ourselves: “Briederke [brother], this won’t take long—you’ll be dead in no time.” We let them into the barracks and they never left again.
I ran from battle station to battle station as a courier, informing the units of our progress. We broke into the German compound and took all their arms, then headed for the administration office. [Scharführer] Beckmann was at his desk. He knew right away something was up because he’d just come from our barrack and found no one there, not even the [Oberscharführer], so he went straight back to the administration office, where we cut him off. He reached for his revolver, but there wasn’t a chance—all of us jumped him without guns and beat him dead because we didn’t want to shoot. The longer we kept things quiet the better off we’d be. It was hard to keep him down because he jerked around in wild death spasms. [. . .]
When everyone was already assembled inside the camp and we were getting ready to attack the arsenal, Zugwachmann Rel—how many times he’d beaten me!—suddenly appeared and realized something was happening when he saw the cut wires. The electricity and telephones were all put out of order by one of us who had access to the generators and smashed them. Rel asked us nervously: “Was gibt es Neues?” [“What’s up?”]. He just happened to be walking right in front of me, so I raised my axe and, along with two friends, chopped him up into little pieces.
Now everyone knew what was about to happen and a deafening cheer went up, shouts of “Vperyod!” “Vorverts!” “Foros!” [“Forward!”]. Our targets were now ahead of us, not behind us—the arms stockpiles! We stormed the arsenal, killed two Germans where they stood, and brought out the guns. All this time we could see nothing but bullet after bullet ripping at us from all sides—from the guard towers, from the Germans and the Volksdeutsche and the 300 Ukrainians who were shooting at us from all around, especially from the fourth camp. They were soon reinforced by another 150 Ukrainians who assaulted us with heavy automatic weapon fire. We returned fire with the few guns we had. But we didn’t keep static positions—we ran from station to station shooting in all directions, and defying the risk, broke out of camp. We were still at the wire perimeter when a youth beside me took a bullet and was left hanging on the wires. I was using a rifle I had gotten from the stockpile and kept on running. There were explosions all around—the mines went off, the bullets struck and flashed everywhere we went. The sound of men being torn to pieces, bullets shattering, and mines detonating thundered all through the area. Later, all we could do was laugh as we heard the rattling of the machine guns trailing off behind us. The shooting kept up all night and we got farther and farther away from the camp. We threw off everything along the way. [. . .]
After we ran several hours and were far from the camp by now, we counted ourselves up because everyone had run off in a different direction. There were twenty-four in our group. We kissed and embraced and couldn’t believe we were really outside the camp. We walked all night through the forest and found a good spot in a gorge grown over with thicket, and that’s where we rested. We didn’t eat all day because what we’d accomplished put us into such a state that we were all flushed from exhilaration and our blood was feverish and made us tremble. We couldn’t eat a bite and there was nothing to eat in the forest anyway. Someone had a piece of bread, a lump of sugar, so we shared it later.
The prisoner uprisings at Sobibór and subsequently at Treblinka were remarkable in that the rebellions struck at the very heart of the genocidal apparatus. Many escapees joined the ranks of partisan units, where they continued to defy Nazi military and occupation authorities. Jewish partisan bands operated extensively throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. Some twenty to thirty thousand Jewish fighters engaged in guerri
lla warfare and sabotage against German forces and those who collaborated with them. These units faced tremendous obstacles in acquiring weapons, food, and shelter and were in constant danger of capture or denunciation by hostile elements within the local population. In eastern Europe, many Jews merged with the Soviet partisan movement, although they often faced discrimination or betrayal by antisemitic comrades in arms. As a result, many Jewish fighters preferred to maintain their own fighting organizations. One of the most successful of these partisan units combined traditional guerrilla activity with extensive rescue efforts. These were the Bielski partisans.14
14. See Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, units of the Einsatzgruppen killed thousands of Jews in western Belorussia (now Belarus).15 Surviving Jews in the Nowogrodek District were confined in ghettos, principally in the towns of Nowogrodek and Lida. In 1942 and early 1943, German authorities liquidated these ghettos, murdering most of the region’s remaining Jewish population.
15. Western Belorussia had been Polish territory before World War II, but it had been annexed by the Soviet Union following the invasion of Poland by German and Soviet forces in September 1939.
The Bielskis were a family of millers and grocers residing in a farming region near the town of Stankiewicze. After a ghetto action in December 1941 in which their parents and other family members were murdered, the four surviving brothers—Tuvia, Alexander (Zus), Asael, and Aron—fled the Nowogrodek ghetto to the nearby forest and, with a handful of fellow escapees, formed the nucleus of a fledging Jewish partisan band. Familiar with the surrounding district, the brothers received arms and supplies from local non-Jewish friends and acquaintances. As their unit expanded, the Bielskis were able to augment their arsenal with captured German weapons and guns supplied by Soviet partisans.
Armed in this manner, the small band began to target and harass German troops and their collaborators operating in the region. Although paramilitary objectives were a major focus, the unit’s recognized leader, Tuvia Bielski,16 began to view as the group’s primary mission the rescue of Jews from the surrounding community. The Bielskis helped Jewish inhabitants of nearby ghettos to escape. Many Jews hiding in small family units also joined their ranks so that, by late 1942, the group had grown to over three hundred members.
16. Tuvia Bielski (1906–1987) emigrated with his third wife, Lilka (née Titkin), to Israel after the war, where he participated in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. He and his family moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1956. Bielski died in the United States in 1987; in 1988, his body was reburied with full military honors in Haar Hmnuchot in Jerusalem.
Such a large partisan group eventually attracted the attention of German authorities, and in the summer of 1943, occupation officials offered a bounty of one hundred thousand Reichsmark for information leading to the capture of Tuvia Bielski. Some twenty thousand German military and local auxiliary units were deployed to locate the Bielski band and to curb the growing partisan movement, composed of Soviet, Polish, and Jewish units, in the Belorussian forests.
In order to escape the German dragnet, the Bielski group, now seven hundred strong, moved in December 1943 to a new base in the swampy marshes of the Naliboki Forest, on the right bank of Nieman River. Here the band established an unlikely and remarkable community. A core group of 150 men—and a handful of women—engaged in armed operations on behalf of the group. Despite dissension within their own ranks from those who insisted that their unit should accept only armed and able-bodied fighters, Tuvia Bielski proved adamant in accepting all Jews who appealed to the group for aid. “To save a Jew is much more important than to kill Germans,” Tuvia told his men.17 As the armed fighters engaged German forces in defense of the unit, other members of the band cultivated arable land in the vicinity and foraged for food and supplies. The community ultimately established a bakery, laundry, and infirmary and set up an improvised synagogue, a tribunal to adjudicate disputes, and a makeshift jail. Some thirty children lived within the Bielski family group.18 The Naliboki base housed a school for adolescents, while a group of female members organized to supervise the youngest children.
17. Tec, Defiance, 82.
18. Tec, Defiance, 165.
In the summer of 1944, the Soviet army staged an offensive that swept the German Army Group Center back to the banks of the Vistula and liberated the greater part of Belorussia. Through the efforts of Tuvia Bielski and his comrades, an astonishing 1,236 Jews from the family camp had survived the war. At liberation, 70 percent of the group consisted of women, children, and the elderly, those individuals most likely to have perished during the German occupation.
Document 9-3. Members of the Bielski partisan family camp, including several small children, shortly before liberation, Naliboki Forest, Belorussia, 1944, USHMMPA WS# 77654, courtesy of the Yad Vashem Photo Archives.
The Bielski partisan movement represented the most successful rescue effort of its kind, but it was not the only instance in which Jewish partisans accepted and protected family units within their ranks. Rachmiel Łozowski was nine years old when he witnessed the killing of the Jews of Zhetl (Zdzięcioł), near Grodno in what is today Belarus in August 1942. As he and his family tried to flee the massacre, police officials apprehended his mother, two younger brothers, and sister, whom he never saw again. Rachmiel, his twelve-year-old brother, and his father were reunited after the raid and found their way to shelter in the Lipiczanska Puszcza forest. There they joined local partisans and lived in their family group for the next two years, surviving the war. In 1947 in Tel Aviv, Łozowski shared with historian A. Yerushalmi his experiences of a childhood spent among the partisan resistance.
Document 9-4. Oral history of Rachmiel Łozowski, Tel Aviv, 1947, USHMMA RG 15.084, Holocaust Survivor Testimonies, 301/540 (translated from the Yiddish).
The forest we were in was at Lipiczanska Puszcza. We stayed together as a family group. There were large partisan units all around us and they didn’t bother us. There were fifty people in our family unit, including five children. We would get food from peasants we knew. A teacher, Lazar Meir, used to take care of the children. He was also able to buy guns for the group. One time he left for the Lida [Ghetto] and came back with five Jews.
In the winter of 1943, fifteen other Jews and two children came to us. After that, still more and more people joined us. [. . .]
In the summer of 1944, the forests were put under siege by 32,000 Germans and Ukrainians. Partisan units pulled back. We hid out in underground bunkers. The starvation during that time was horrible. We used to get a few beans a day to eat. This went on for fourteen days. There was room for five people in our bunker—fourteen people lay down there during the siege. As a camouflage, we dragged two dead horses over to cover the entrance. When the Germans moved through with their hounds, the dogs bolted back from the stench. But we suffered terribly from those worm-eaten carcasses. The worms crawled all over us and we choked on the stink of death. We fainted from the putrid air.
Another time, we heard cavalry riding past followed by infantry. We thought they were Germans. We crawled out and started to run. My father was the only one to stay behind in the bunker. The “Germans” got him out and wanted to know who he was and what he was doing here. He told them he was part of a partisan family unit. All they did was yell at him for keeping a fire lit, then they left. They were partisans too, just like us. [. . .]
Sometimes the children would wander around outside the bunker. Once, two boys—Yosif and Srulik, aged seven and eight—and two little girls, aged four and five, fell into the hands of the Ukrainians. They shot the little girls dead right away and took the boys into the village gendarmes. The boys pleaded with the Ukrainians to let them go, but in vain. At that moment, grown-ups from our group passed by, and the boys started shouting: “See?! There go the adult
s!” The Ukrainians let go of the children and chased the grown-ups. The children got away and ran down into the bunker. Malke Shmulovitch fell into the Ukrainians’ hands. They led her into the village, raped her, cut out strips of her flesh, and poured salt into her wounds. She betrayed no one, though, and died heroically.
This is the way we suffered for such a long time. We always had knives ready at our sides, to take our own lives if we fell into the hands of the Ukrainians.
One day, Captain “Severny,” the Jewish Avreyml Shereshevski, came to see us to tell us the good news that the Red Army was near. I was the first one he met. I ran to tell the glad news to my people. I searched for them all day and finally found them. When I told them the news, they came back to life.
Unarmed Resistance: The Children’s War
Acts of armed resistance against Nazi and Axis oppression make up an integral chapter in the history of the Holocaust. Large-scale uprisings undertaken by Jewish underground organizations, such as those in the Warsaw and Białystok ghettos or in the Auschwitz, Sobibór, and Treblinka killing centers, demonstrated that Jewish populations did not go meekly like lambs to the slaughter, as some analysts have claimed, but openly defied German authorities and those who collaborated with them. For many Jewish communities in Nazi-occupied Europe, however, the constraints of captivity and the threat of brutal reprisals made armed resistance difficult and dangerous. Under such extreme conditions, most sectors of the Jewish population that wished to oppose Nazi persecution engaged in unarmed resistance. Such efforts included organized escapes of individuals to partisan units or to safe havens outside ghettos or camps, as well as the noncompliance of ghetto administrators, officials, and residents with Nazi decrees and the organization of educational, religious, and cultural activities prohibited by German authorities. While such actions posed no physical threat to their antagonists, they struck at the core of Nazi discriminatory policy.
Children during the Holocaust Page 46